Archive for July, 2011

We all know cost has almost nothing to do with the quality of wine, right? Yeah, well, meet the Domaine Serene Pinot Noir product line, which progresses from price point to price point with an almost engineered precision. No confusion here, and no one is going to come away surprised to find that one of [...]

Click here if you think its a good use of your time to sign an online manifesto promising that you’ll never use a critic’s score to choose a bottle of wine again. The 100 point rating system is a clumsy and useless tool for examining wine. If wine is, as we believe, a subjective, subtle, [...]

Christian Vanneque, former head sommelier at La Tour d’Argent in Paris, paid more at auction for a bottle of white wine than anyone in history. Bidding in London, he paid £75,000 ($122,000) for a standard-size bottle of 1811 Château d’Yquem. The previous most-expensive-white-wine in history was a bottle of Woodbridge Chardonnay a lawyer acquaintance of mine [...]

The government of Great Britain has decided it’s OK for Brits to drink more. That is, after noting that the previous recommendation had been “plucked out of the air,” government scientists turned to actual health data to determine how much adults can drink each day before their health starts to deteriorate. The answer: more. The [...]

India, which is not bound by tradition in its adoption of wine, contemplates making wine out of pineapples. This commitment to innovation is perhaps why India has to have a ministry “responsible for permitting liquor production from a new substance” — because without that sort of regulation, there’s no telling what might show up in [...]

Two not-at-all-surprising results from an online poll commissioned by Sommelier Journal: First, most people (64%) think wine in restaurants is over-priced. Sommelier Journal didn’t release underlying data, but I’d be interested to know how many people thought wine was too cheap — or, for that matter, if there’s a survey anywhere showing that a group [...]

I interviewed Mary Melton, the wine buyer — excuse me: Director of Beverage — for PF Chang’s. The interview is for an article I wrote for Vineyard & Winery Management. (The article, which I think runs in August, is really interesting; everyone should subscribe to the magazine and patronize its advertisers.) One thing that came [...]

Opera Unlimited, a British performance troupe that exposes impressionable young minds to musical theater, is performing an operetta based on Michael Broadbent’s wine tasting notes. The Lovely Ladies tells the story of a group of wines who hear a rumour, on the eve of a Christie’s auction, that their champion Michael Broadbent is to leave [...]

The bartender stares blankly at me. I am in the lobby bar of an old, downtown hotel in a medium sized city. The hotel has been beautifully renovated, rescued from its fate as a cheap residence to resume its role as an urban hub. People go to the restaurant for Sunday brunch; the bar is [...]